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Liminal Play: Coauthoring Narratives across Metaleptic, Metadramatic, and Transludic Interactions

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Title: Liminal Play: Coauthoring Narratives across Metaleptic, Metadramatic, and Transludic Interactions
Language: English
Authors: Alex Corbitt (ORCID 0000-0002-3453-3214)
Source: Reading Research Quarterly. 2025 60(3).
Availability: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 17
Publication Date: 2025
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Research
Descriptors: Role Playing, Educational Games, Story Telling, Play, Narration, Drama, Power Structure, Adolescents, Videoconferencing
DOI: 10.1002/rrq.70036
ISSN: 0034-0553
1936-2722
Abstract: Role-playing games (RPGs) are storytelling activities that mediate co-authorship through a variety of in-game, out-of-game, and intertextual relationships. Liminal interactions sometimes occur during RPG play that blur these categories. To understand the purposes and processes of "liminal play," this study analyzed data from a yearlong RPG program co-facilitated by six teenage boys on Zoom. Thinking with three concepts from game studies and narratology--metalepsis, metadrama, and transludology--findings highlight how moments of liminal play helped participants negotiate the dramatic content and authorial procedures of their unfolding narrative worlds. Rethinking theories of play that conceptualize game narratives and game mechanics as discrete phenomena, the discussion examines how a variety of rules, roles, and relationships intersect during moments of liminal play. As a result, study implications consider how researchers and practitioners might account for the complex dynamics of liminal play in ways that interrogate power differentials embedded in playful contexts.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2025
Accession Number: EJ1478133
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0186884673;[nrnu]01jul.25;2025Jul28.03:13;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0186884673-1">Liminal Play: Coauthoring Narratives Across Metaleptic, Metadramatic, and Transludic Interactions </title> <p>Role‐playing games (RPGs) are storytelling activities that mediate co‐authorship through a variety of in‐game, out‐of‐game, and intertextual relationships. Liminal interactions sometimes occur during RPG play that blur these categories. To understand the purposes and processes of "liminal play," this study analyzed data from a yearlong RPG program co‐facilitated by six teenage boys on Zoom. Thinking with three concepts from game studies and narratology—metalepsis, metadrama, and transludology—findings highlight how moments of liminal play helped participants negotiate the dramatic content and authorial procedures of their unfolding narrative worlds. Rethinking theories of play that conceptualize game narratives and game mechanics as discrete phenomena, the discussion examines how a variety of rules, roles, and relationships intersect during moments of liminal play. As a result, study implications consider how researchers and practitioners might account for the complex dynamics of liminal play in ways that interrogate power differentials embedded in playful contexts.</p> <p>Keywords: composition; literacies; meaning‐making; play</p> <p>Liminal play heuristic</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/01jul25/rrq70036-toc-0001.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70036-toc-0001.jpg" title="." /> </p> <p></p> <hd id="AN0186884673-3">Introduction</hd> <p>Five boys look on as the sixth—Olly—shares his Zoom screen. Olly's screen displays a map of a fantasy world. For the past six weeks, the participants have explored locations on the map and co‐authored a play‐based narrative. Now, they are about to encounter the final challenge.</p> <p>"Alright," says Olly, "all of you are teleported to what looks like a giant open room. You see one giant person in the room, and it's HEVE STARVEY!"</p> <p>"Steve Harvey?" asks a participant named Drew.</p> <p>"Welcome to The Riddle Game!" continues Olly, "Answer two out of three riddles successfully and you may pass."</p> <p>It's Ste ‐ oh we're playing Family Feud!laughs Mark</p> <p>Role‐playing games (RPGs) have had a resurgence in popularity in contemporary gaming and popular culture (Knight [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref1">45</reflink>]). RPGs, like <emph>Dungeons and Dragons</emph>, are storytelling games that leverage character generation, improvisational acting, and rule‐based interactions to build worlds and co‐author narratives. Participants in RPGs employ countless, robust literacies across three playspaces: the game (i.e., character‐based actions in the narrative world), metagame (i.e., the player‐based actions around rules and strategy), and intertext—references and citations from beyond the game (Boluk and Lemieux [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref2">10</reflink>]; Fine [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref3">25</reflink>]; Garcia [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref4">28</reflink>]; Garfield [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref5">32</reflink>]). Taking up these three categories as phenomena of inquiry, I examined moments of play that blurred and straddled these playspaces. As illustrated in the vignette of Olly, Drew, and Mark (all names and organizations pseudonyms), RPGs often feature jarring moments when participants interact or evoke intertextual references in ways that transgress the divide between different narratives or worlds (e.g., Steve Harvey appearing in a fantasy world). I defined these moments as "liminal play," when the boundaries between players, characters, and intertextual references converge. In particular, I was interested in moments of liminal play as sites of collaborative storytelling and meaning‐making. In the opening vignette, for example, Olly's evocation of Steve Harvey (re)oriented how his peers subsequently understood and authored the campaign narrative—Mark noted that the ensuing challenge (i.e., The Riddle Game) would resemble the rules and interactional structure of <emph>Family Feud</emph>. To understand similar instances of liminal play and co‐authorship, I asked: <emph>How did six youth participants in an online worldbuilding program engage in liminal play across four role‐playing game campaigns? What co‐authorship practices were enacted through liminal play?</emph></p> <p>Drawing on data from an online worldbuilding program on Zoom during the 2021–2022 academic year, I analyzed four RPG campaigns facilitated by youth game masters (GMs). Oriented by concepts from game studies (e.g., transludology) and narratology (e.g., metalepsis and metadrama), I examined moments of liminal play to understand how they informed and sustained youth co‐authorship. The findings explain how participants leveraged three types of liminal play—metaleptic play, metadramatic play, and transludic play—to negotiate the content and processes of their role‐playing co‐authorship. Implications of the study consider how researchers and practitioners might account for the complex dynamics of liminal play in ways that interrogate power differentials embedded in playful contexts.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-4">Literature Review</hd> <p>Contemporary literacies and game studies research consider games to be robust, multimodal sites of meaning‐making and composition. First, I review how research on gaming extends traditional notions of texts and literacy. Then, I survey role‐playing scholarship to consider how RPGs mediate learning and co‐authorship in and beyond classroom contexts.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-5">Gaming Literacies</hd> <p>Early literacies research critiqued the primacy of alphanumeric print and argued that texts can contain an array of multimodal design elements including spatial, aural, visual, gestural, and linguistic features (New London Group [<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref6">54</reflink>]). Both digital games (e.g., video games) and analog games (e.g., tabletop games) exemplify multimodal richness by employing rules, language, graphic design, soundscapes, and interactive tools to mediate play‐based narratives (Consalvo [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref7">14</reflink>]; Garcia et al. [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref8">31</reflink>]; Gee [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref9">33</reflink>]). Furthermore, games have affective (Hollet and Ehret [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref10">38</reflink>]) and affiliative (Abrams and Lammers [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref11">1</reflink>]) properties that bring players together in processes of meaning‐making and self‐expression. Sometimes games are a part of transmediated texts—narratives that are composed across multiple forms of media—to tell stories through varying modes and genres of composition (Rowsell et al. [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref12">59</reflink>]). Thus, games are complex texts that demand a breadth of analytic practices and have incredible potential for learning and identity work (Beavis [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref13">4</reflink>]; Cole and Barker [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref14">13</reflink>]). For these reasons, gaming and play are a nascent phenomena of inquiry in education research.</p> <p>Educators and researchers have implemented game‐based learning across elementary (Spires [<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref15">63</reflink>]), middle (Marlatt [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref16">51</reflink>]), and secondary (Nash and Randi [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref17">52</reflink>]) contexts. While some studies have examined how youth engage in commercial off‐the‐shelf (COTS) games to supplement curricular materials, others have examined how serious games (i.e., games designed for educational goals) employ skills‐based learning to teach players about discipline‐specific content knowledge (Barab et al. [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref18">3</reflink>]; Beavis et al. [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref19">5</reflink>]; Ketelhut et al. [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref20">43</reflink>]; Squire [<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref21">66</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib68" id="ref22">68</reflink>]). Consequently, teachers and teacher educators might leverage games to design beyond the pedagogical constraints of their curricula in ways that privilege children's creativity and prior knowledge (Kim and Johnson [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref23">44</reflink>]). Researchers, too, can study games to better understand how they mobilize semiotic tools to promote higher‐order thinking processes and offer new models for designing learning environments (Rowsell [<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref24">58</reflink>]). The latter work calls for instructional innovation beyond mere gamification (i.e., repackaging rote, instructivist pedagogies with games such as Jeopardy) and challenges educators to consider how games unsettle and reimagine preconceptions about schooling (Bogost [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref25">9</reflink>]).</p> <p>Beyond their relevance to school‐based pedagogies, games are also unique learning contexts (Squire [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref26">67</reflink>]). Games constitute "third places" (Steinkuehler and Williams [<reflink idref="bib70" id="ref27">70</reflink>]) beyond the binary of work and home life with specialized, situated practices (Lave and Wenger [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref28">47</reflink>]) that afford players novel opportunities for learning and socialization. Massive multiplayer online video games, for example, have their own unique norms and discourses that shape how participants interact and engage in collaborative storytelling (Steinkuehler [<reflink idref="bib71" id="ref29">71</reflink>]). There are many other extra academic gaming contexts—escape rooms (Wargo and Garcia [<reflink idref="bib80" id="ref30">80</reflink>]), arcades (Lin and Sun [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref31">48</reflink>]), live‐streams (Taylor [<reflink idref="bib76" id="ref32">76</reflink>]), tabletop gaming (Garcia [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref33">29</reflink>]), and more—that reconfigure how players make meaning of semiotic resources, encounter audiences, and demonstrate an array of literacy practices. As politicized spaces, games can also provide opportunities to engage in civic discourses and activism (Cortez et al. [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref34">19</reflink>]). Building on this program of gaming research, I analyzed the literacies youth demonstrated in an online, extra academic role‐playing game community.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-6">Role‐Playing Literacies</hd> <p>Building on scholarship that establishes games as texts and learning contexts, I turn to research on role‐playing literacies. Across school and extra‐academic settings, RPGs feature a wide scope of innovative, collaborative composing practices.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-7">Role‐Play in and Beyond Schooling</hd> <p>Role‐playing is both a traditional and emergent practice in schooling contexts. Simkins and Steinkuehler ([<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref35">62</reflink>]) explained how, "when a young person represents Uganda in Model U.N., they are role‐playing for the purpose of learning. The same can be said for a history student participating in a mock trial" (p. 339). Learners role‐play as scientists, politicians, and lawyers to develop epistemic frames that contextualize youth composing (Shaffer [<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref36">61</reflink>]). Role‐playing with rules and mechanics in the style of <emph>Dungeons & Dragons</emph>, however, is a more recent phenomenon in school settings. Jones et al. ([<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref37">42</reflink>]) examined how high schoolers played RPGs to explore their identities, resist racist narratives, and embody interactions between canonical literary characters. Building on this scholarship, Storm and Jones et al. ([<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref38">42</reflink>]) outlined how a group of students in a queer‐led afterschool space leveraged role‐playing to rethink problematic social norms as a method of dreaming toward queer utopian futures. Finally, Seltzer ([<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref39">60</reflink>]) demonstrated how high school teachers mobilized critical translanguaging practices by interrogating raciolinguistic ideologies through processes of role‐playing. These studies establish role‐playing as a burgeoning platform for critical literacies in schooling contexts.</p> <p>Studying RPGs in extra academic settings, Garcia ([<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref40">31</reflink>]) spent over 2 years in a community of adult <emph>Dungeons & Dragons</emph> players. Garcia inventoried their many literacy practices across gameplay, player interactions, and references from beyond the game. This work illustrated how moment‐to‐moment interactions in role‐play contained complex interpersonal and intertextual thinking. Rejecting the ideological neutrality of role‐playing games, Garcia ([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref41">27</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref42">29</reflink>]) also outlined and critiqued how role‐players render issues of race, gender, and power across their storytelling practices.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-8">Role‐Playing as Co‐Authorship</hd> <p>Role‐playing is a collaborative activity that requires participants to negotiate their relationships and play trajectories (de Souza e Silva and Delacruz [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref43">23</reflink>]; Edmiston [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref44">24</reflink>]; Tan et al. [<reflink idref="bib75" id="ref45">75</reflink>]). Simkins and Steinkuehler ([<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref46">62</reflink>]) wrote that RPGs, "have the unique ability of providing experiences that are entirely co‐constructed by both designer and player. Not only is the experience of game play coproduced, but the meaning of the games is coproduced" (p. 339). Through processes of co‐operative social organization (Goodwin [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref47">34</reflink>]), role‐players offer up suggestions, strategies, performances and other meaningful actions (i.e., substrates) upon which other players add subsequent, layered interactions. As a result, RPG narratives have a polyphonic (Bakhtin [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref48">2</reflink>]; Cortez et al. [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref49">18</reflink>]) quality—a multivoicedness of play‐based interactions. Thus, RPGs are sites of co‐authorship between multiple stakeholders. This is particularly interesting because the negotiated nature of RPGs allows space for players to "construct and co‐configure new possibilities of a social order" (Burroughs [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref50">11</reflink>], p. 155). By understanding the nuances to how RPG literacies and co‐authorship unfold during play, we might better understand how learning environments can be critically restructured to privilege the design trajectories of multiple individuals.</p> <p>Building on the above scholarship, I seek to illuminate how RPG literacies and co‐authorship are negotiated across a variety of liminal playspaces. By problematizing the discrete boundaries between characters, players, and intertextual references, this study works to uncover new, innovative literacies that emerge from role‐playing.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-9">Conceptualizing Liminal Play</hd> <p>I position this study as an expansion of Garcia's ([<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref51">28</reflink>]) three spatialities of gaming: "in the game," "at the table," and "beyond the table." Each of these spatial categories is a site of robust literacies. In the game, participants interact as characters, discover ancient lore, and engage in local politics. At the table, participants interact as players to strategize future actions and negotiate game‐specific mechanics. Beyond the table, participants interact as fans and members of communities beyond the playspace—drawing from other fandoms (e.g., <emph>Star Wars</emph>, <emph>Percy Jackson</emph>, <emph>Magic the Gathering</emph>, etc.), texts, and memberships that inform their role‐play. In this article, I refer to these three playspaces as the "game," "metagame," and "intertext."</p> <p>Since this study was facilitated on Zoom during the height of the COVID‐19 pandemic, the participants' online role‐playing interactions prompted me to question how the "table" of play was spatially (un)bounded. While on Zoom, participants rapidly toggled between impersonating their characters, sharing memes, manipulating digital content (e.g., world maps and 3D character models), wearing physical costumes, and engaging in sidebar conversations. It sometimes became unclear where role‐playing began and ended. This playful ambiguity led me to discover moments of role‐playing that blurred the boundaries between the game, metagame, intertext. Role‐play studies scholarship terms these moments of converging playspaces "bleed" (Beltrán [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref52">8</reflink>]; Olmstead‐Dean [<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref53">55</reflink>]; White et al. [<reflink idref="bib82" id="ref54">82</reflink>]). Bleed refers to moments that fissure the magic circle (Huizinga [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref55">41</reflink>]) of play that separates in‐game and out‐of‐game contexts. For example, bleed occurs "when a player's thoughts and emotions influence the thoughts and emotions of the character they are role‐playing (bleed‐in) or a character's thoughts and emotions influence the player (bleed‐out)" (Stenros and Bowman [<reflink idref="bib72" id="ref56">72</reflink>], p. 420). While other studies have investigated forms of play that transgress game boundaries—such as glitching (Corbitt and Becker [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref57">17</reflink>]; Rivero and Gutiérrez [<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref58">57</reflink>]) and alternate reality games (Garcia and Niemeyer [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref59">30</reflink>])—I was particularly interested in how bleed occurred in RPGs to conceptualize a theory of liminal play.</p> <p>I define liminal play as moments when game, metagame, and intertextual interactions bleed into one another. This definition builds upon a history of anthropology research (Van Gennep [<reflink idref="bib79" id="ref60">79</reflink>]) that understood liminal phases of human development as "betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial" (Turner [<reflink idref="bib77" id="ref61">77</reflink>], p. 95). Adopting liminality as an anti‐structure that ruptures social normativities, feminist theorists have examined how liminal moments of play can unsettle and dismantle hierarchies of gender and race (Harkin [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref62">36</reflink>]). More than a composite of game and nongame contexts, liminal play can be a site of ontological and phenomenological transformation (Ramsay [<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref63">56</reflink>]). Though not all games are "liminal games" that blur in‐game and out‐of‐game contexts, and not all liminal play is consequential, there is reason to believe that RPGs have potential for critical, transformational storywork (Harviainen [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref64">37</reflink>]; Horrigan [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref65">39</reflink>]). In this study, I was interested in how liminal play signified moments of negotiated co‐authorship. I examined three liminal phenomena that occur during RPGs: metalepsis, metadrama, and transludology. Table 1 provides concise definitions of the latter phenomena, and I elaborate on these terms in the proceeding sections.</p> <p>1 TABLE Defining liminal spaces of gaming literacies.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead valign="bottom"><tr><th align="left"><p>The Spaces of Gaming Literacies</p><p>(Adapted from Garcia <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="bibr28">2020</xref>)</p></th></tr><tr><th align="left">Concepts</th><th align="center">Definitions</th></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td align="left">Game</td><td align="center">"In the game" interactions that occur within the narrative world of the role‐playing game. Participants collaborate as characters.</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Metagame</td><td align="center">"At the table" interactions that occur outside of the narrative world of the role‐playing game. Participants negotiate rules and strategies while collaborating as players.</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Intertext</td><td align="center">"Beyond the table" knowledge and histories from contexts outside the gameplay setting. Participants collaborate as fans and members of communities beyond the role‐playing game.</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p></p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead valign="bottom"><tr><th align="left"><p>The Liminal Spaces of Gaming Literacies</p><p>Moments when the boundaries between game, metagame, and intertext bleed into each other. Liminal play includes three phenomena: metaleptic, metadramatic, and transludic interaction</p></th></tr><tr><th align="left">Concepts</th><th align="center">Definitions</th></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td align="left">Metaleptic Play</td><td align="center">A liminal moment when elements from separate contexts or narratives bleed into the game.Example: Darth Vader appearing in a Star Trek game.</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Metadramatic Play</td><td align="center">A liminal moment when the boundaries between characters and players bleed into each other. The characters become aware they are in a game.Example: A character complaining about game rules or the outcome of a dice roll.</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Transludic Play</td><td align="center">A liminal moment when the rules and design elements of a game merge with the mechanics of an entirely different game.Example: A medieval fantasy game featuring elements of Jeopardy or The Price is Right.</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <hd id="AN0186884673-10">Metalepsis</hd> <p>Metalepsis—a type of unnatural narratology—is when characters, narrators, or story elements of a text transgress traditional narrative boundaries (Bell [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref66">6</reflink>]). While there are many types of metalepsis, this study specifically focuses on horizontal metalepsis (Bell and Alber [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref67">7</reflink>]). Horizontal metalepsis is when characters or narrative features travel between unrelated texts and storyworlds. For example, Darth Vader appearing in an Indiana Jones film would be a jarring instance of metalepsis. While both film franchises were created by the same author (i.e., George Lucas), Darth Vader and Indiana Jones exist across different universes, timelines, and genres. By examining moments of role‐playing that featured metalepsis, I sought to understand how intertextual references—including prior knowledge, identity texts (Wargo [<reflink idref="bib81" id="ref68">81</reflink>]), and community affiliations from beyond the game—are taken up and negotiated by participants as a co‐authorship practice.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-11">Metadrama</hd> <p>Metadrama is a term in narratology that refers to moments of self‐reflexive storytelling that disrupt the audience's position as omniscient observers (Lovrod [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref69">50</reflink>]). Put another way, metadrama entails moments of storytelling in which the characters become aware they are in a narrative and break the "fourth wall" by addressing narrators or audience members. Historically, metadrama has been employed as a narrative technique to investigate the extent to which characters and participants have free will within storytelling contexts (Stewart [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref70">73</reflink>]). Characters in metafiction will express a capacity for self‐determination to demonstrate how the author does not control them like a puppet. Metadrama is particularly intriguing in role‐playing contexts because it is a site of negotiation wherein players and characters determine their agency over the narrative trajectory of the unfolding campaign.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-12">Transludology</hd> <p>Thinking with Howell ([<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref71">40</reflink>]) and Cannon et al.'s ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref72">12</reflink>]) concept of transludic play (i.e., drawing upon diverse repertoires of game knowledge and histories of play), I define transludology as the comparative practice of evoking diverse game systems and histories of participation within a play context. In this study, I analyzed transludic moments of play when the rules and design elements from different games bled into participants' RPG interactions. These moments provided insights into how participants normed their actions and made sense of their game environments.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-13">Method</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0186884673-14">Study Context</hd> <p>This multi‐case study (Stake [<reflink idref="bib69" id="ref73">69</reflink>]) was part of a 3‐year collaboration with an educational nonprofit organization named EdQuest. EdQuest facilitated extra academic programming that taught social skills, storytelling practices, and science content through role‐playing. In particular, EdQuest focused on learning through live‐action role‐playing (i.e., LARPing). LARPing is a version of role‐playing in which participants dress up as their characters and engage in embodied interactions rather than playing at a table with figurines and dice. EdQuest offered after‐school programming during the school year and week‐long camp sessions during the summer. The youths and young adults enrolled at EdQuest ranged from 7 to 20 years old. The majority of EdQuest staff and participants identified as white. The organization was particularly popular among youths and young adults who identified as neurodivergent. The organization's founder, Morgan, said the primary goal of EdQuest was to create an inclusive space for individuals to participate in collaborative storytelling and community building. I visited EdQuest weekly between October 2019 and March 2020 to participate in their programs and learn from their staff.</p> <p>In late March 2020, EdQuest paused its in‐person programs due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. During this time, I regularly met with the EdQuest staff on Zoom to help transition their analog programs into online programs. Over the next year, I attended EdQuest's virtual offerings. Between April and June 2021, David—the organization's director—trained me to moderate a youth‐led program. I proposed co‐designing a program with youth called The Worldbuilding Workshop. The goal of the program was to provide each youth participant with approximately 6 weeks to be a game master (GM), design a customized world, and facilitate an original RPG narrative. The GMs' peers would create characters and collaborate as protagonists in the unfolding narrative. Worldbuilding was a unique aspect of the program because RPG campaigns are typically facilitated with the help of a codex or manual that includes predetermined lore, narratives, inhabitants, and mechanics for a game world. Instead of relying on the content of existing fantasy worlds, I was interested in how youths autonomously generated and facilitated customized settings and stories. As I planned The Worldbuilding Workshop, I attended David's virtual programming for 3 months to gain insights into his pedagogical practices. David also met with me eight times (totaling 7.3 h) to help me develop and play‐test an 8‐week campaign to model for my participants. This 6‐month apprenticeship process prepared me to run The Worldbuilding Workshop with fidelity to EdQuest's instructional approach and vision.</p> <p>In August 2021, I distributed Worldbuilding Workshop flyers to the EdQuest listserv. In response, six adolescent boys applied and enrolled in the program: Olly (16 years old), Mark (13 years old), Drew (13 years old), Alec (13 years old), Kyle (13 years old), and Jacob (14 years old). Only Alec and Kyle knew each other prior to the program. All six participants identified as white and used he/him pronouns. During informal check‐in conversations with participants' guardians, I learned that Mark, Alec, Olly, and Kyle were autistic. The guardians shared the latter information to contextualize why their children appreciated the social and interactional structure of RPG programming. All six participants were experienced role‐players and had enrolled in multiple EdQuest programs before. However, none of the participants had experience facilitating their own RPG campaigns prior to The Worldbuilding Workshop. Even though our program convened online, all participants lived within a 20‐mile radius of each other.</p> <p>The Worldbuilding Workshop ran weekly from August 2021 to July 2022, meeting on Wednesday afternoons for 90 min—totaling 41 play sessions and 61.5 h of collaborative RPG storytelling. The youths facilitated every session except for the first 10 weeks when I modeled my own RPG campaign. In addition to the play sessions, I conducted 46 interviews (totaling 26.7 h) with participants during their respective turns as GMs of their own customized worlds. The purpose of these interviews was to trace GMs' post‐session reflections and planning as they created materials for subsequent chapters of their campaigns.</p> <p>In my findings, I will discuss seven forms of liminal play I found through my analysis of participants' campaigns. These seven forms of liminal play were evident across all four participant campaigns in the study (see Table 2). For this paper, I frame Olly's campaign as a critical instance case (Davey [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref74">22</reflink>]) and analyze a series of play vignettes from his campaign. These vignettes exemplify the liminal phenomena I documented across all four cases. I specifically focus on Olly's campaign because it was the first youth‐led RPG campaign—the context in which the youth normed and established their habits of role‐playing. As a result, Olly's campaign featured the most innovative and frictional negotiations of liminal play because players were learning how to judiciously co‐author narratives. Drew, Mark, Kyle, and Alec's campaigns subsequently mirrored and iterated on the types of liminal activities in Olly's campaign.</p> <p>2 TABLE Participant campaigns from The Worldbuilding Workshop.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead valign="bottom"><tr><th align="left">Case</th><th align="center">GM(s)</th><th align="center">Campaign</th><th align="center">Duration</th><th align="center">Interviews</th><th align="center">Liminal play features</th></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td align="left">0</td><td align="center">Alex</td><td align="center">Welcome to Ravin</td><td align="center">10 Sessions (15 h)</td><td align="center">0(0 h)</td><td align="center">(1) Metalepsis as Inter‐Narrative Continuity(2) Metalepsis as Mentor Text(3) Metalepsis as Community Bridging(4) Metadrama as Knowledge Management(5) Metadrama as Narrative Momentum(6) Metadrama as Compositional Negotiation(7) Transludology as Interactional Norming</td></tr><tr><td align="left">1</td><td align="center">Olly</td><td align="center">Kingdoms of Luxa</td><td align="center">6 Sessions(9 h)</td><td align="center">4(1.92 h)</td></tr><tr><td align="left">2</td><td align="center">Andy</td><td align="center">The Reign of Duscal</td><td align="center">11 Sessions(16.5 h)</td><td align="center">18(8.76 h)</td></tr><tr><td align="left">3</td><td align="center">Mark</td><td align="center">The Drow Civil War</td><td align="center">6 Sessions(9 h)</td><td align="center">7(6.87 h)</td></tr><tr><td align="left">4</td><td align="center">Kyle & Alec</td><td align="center">Realms of the Elementals</td><td align="center">8 Sessions(12 Hrs)</td><td align="center">17(9.15 h)</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <hd id="AN0186884673-15">Researcher Positionality</hd> <p>As a gamer‐researcher, I situated myself in the study as a workshop facilitator and fellow gamer. Like the participants, I had a long history of playing tabletop RPGs (i.e., <emph>Dungeons & Dragons</emph>, and <emph>Vampire: The Masquerade</emph>) and video game RPGs (i.e., <emph>Baldur's Gate</emph>, <emph>Icewind Dale</emph>, etc.). Despite my gaming history, many of the participants had more experience playing RPGs than I did. Instead of framing myself as an RPG expert, I focused on creating the conditions for participants to generate worlds and facilitate cooperative storytelling. Although I facilitated a customized introductory RPG campaign, the goal of this campaign was to introduce the participants to various worldbuilding processes: designing characters, developing game mechanics, using 3D modeling software, and crafting digital maps. Although some moments of liminal play occurred during my campaign, they were fleeting. As I will explain in my findings, liminal play often occurred as interjections when participants negotiated the terms of play or connected around shared fandoms. During my campaign, the participants were still adjusting to my role and facilitation style as an EdQuest staff member.</p> <p>When participants facilitated their own campaigns, I joined as a participant‐observer (Spradley [<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref75">64</reflink>]) and occasionally contributed to help them negotiate turn‐taking, respectful discourse, and fair play. Besides the aforementioned moments, I avoided interrupting play unless invited into the space by the participants. Sometimes the GMs asked me to join their campaigns to role‐play as side characters, such as townspeople or merchants. The GMs typically role‐played the more consequential non‐player characters (NPCs), such as the campaign antagonists. Before and after each session, I asked game design questions to prompt open‐ended participant discourse about their meaning‐making and composing practices. Given our shared positionalities as white, male gamers, I tried to raise critical conversations about race and gender when confronting hegemonic lore (e.g., monstrous matriarchal societies, evil characters of Color, etc.) from popular RPGs such as <emph>Dungeons & Dragons</emph>. A broader goal of the study was to prompt conversations that interrogated the ideologies and politics of worldbuilding.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-16">Data Generation</hd> <p>As detailed in Table 2, the four youth‐led RPG campaigns yielded 31 play sessions (totalling 46.5 h) and 46 participant interviews (totalling 26.7 h). In addition to the play session recordings and interviews, I collected various play‐based texts, such as participants' character sheets, a customized game mechanics, and various world maps. Below, I will describe my data corpus and elaborate on how it provided relevant insights into liminal play.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-17">Play Session Recordings</hd> <p>Play sessions occurred weekly on Zoom. In the beginning of each session, the designated GM provided a narrative summary of the previous session. Other participants clarified or elaborated on the GM's account during this summary. Then, the GM began the next chapter of their campaign and invited the players to begin role‐playing. During this time, I sometimes asked participants to clarify, justify, and predict unfolding events in the storyline.</p> <p>The audio and video from each Zoom session were recorded. These recordings featured an array of analog and digital phenomena. The analog phenomena included a variety of embodied and material interactions that mediated play. For example, there were moments when participants engaged in physical challenges (e.g., running in place, or moving to different quadrants of their screen) to accomplish game‐based objectives (e.g., crossing a collapsing bridge, or blocking enemy attacks). Participants also sometimes used costuming (e.g., masks) and props (e.g., brooms and sticks) to represent their characters. Beyond embodied play, participants used material objects such as coins and dice to determine the outcomes of player‐character interactions. Many of the GMs, for instance, used 20‐sided dice (i.e., D20s) to decide the degree to which players' actions (e.g., attacks, evasive maneuvers, etc.) were effective. Rolling a "natural" 20 inevitably resulted in success, whereas rolling a 1 or 2 signified a failed action. While embodiment and material objects shaped and propelled the role‐playing narratives, it is worth noting that four of the six participants preferred to keep their cameras off and participate verbally. I always honored participants' privacy preferences, even though it drastically limited the embodied and gestural data that we generated together.</p> <p>The digital phenomena in the session recordings included various platforms and screen‐sharing practices in which participants engaged. Many GMs used websites such as Inkarnate and Hero Forge to build maps and character models. Beyond these design‐based platforms for composing and performing play, participants regularly shared links to YouTube videos, memes, and fandom encyclopedias (e.g., Forgotten Realms Wiki). To organize game action and play, GMs sometimes used digital timers and dice rolling programs to determine rule‐based outcomes of role‐playing.</p> <p>I used Otter.ai, an artificial intelligence transcription service, to generate an initial transcript of the play session recordings. While Otter.ai only transcribed my recordings with roughly 70% accuracy, I retrospectively cleaned the data as I listened back to the recordings.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-18">Retrospective Design Interviews</hd> <p>In addition to the weekly play session recordings, I conducted semi‐structured (Spradley [<reflink idref="bib65" id="ref76">65</reflink>]) weekly interviews with the GMs. The first half of the interviews would be retrospective design interviews (Dalton et al. [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref77">21</reflink>]) intended to understand how the GMs interpreted the previous play session. During our conversations, I revisited important moments of campaign plot development to understand the GMs' interpretations and opinions about how the RPG storyline was unfolding through participant co‐authorship. Sometimes the storylines unfolded as they planned, and other times they expressed surprise at the campaign's direction. These discussion points helped me understand how the GMs made sense of the negotiated processes of game‐based co‐authorship. In the second half of the interviews, I invited the GMs to share the scenes they planned for the upcoming play session. Some GMs used this part of the interview as an opportunity to brainstorm and draft the next installment of their campaign.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-19">Additional Game Data</hd> <p>In my meetings with GMs, they shared additional texts they created for their campaigns. These texts included multiple iterations of world maps, narrative outlines, and Google documents with customized rulesets they used to facilitate gameplay. They spoke through these texts with me and explained how they shaped their interactions with the other participants. These materials interested me because they were additional texts that exerted agency over the campaign trajectories. Customized game rules, for example, served as programming "behind the scenes" of play. Whenever GMs rolled dice, they conferred with their notes of character statistics and abilities to determine how actions and scenes unfolded.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-20">Data Analysis</hd> <p>My data analysis spanned three sequential phases. First, I coded the data for moments of game, metagame, and intertextual play. Then, I identified moments of liminal play—moments when the boundaries between game, metagame, and intertextual interactions bled into one another. Finally, I revisited moments of liminal play to determine the compositional function they served within the co‐authored narrative of the role‐playing game. I describe these three phases below.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-21">Phase 1: Coding for Game, Metagame, and Intertext</hd> <p>In Phase 1, I took a phenomenological approach (Corbin and Strauss [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref78">15</reflink>]) to coding the play session transcripts and their corresponding video timestamps. I color‐coded moments of participant play according to game, metagame, and intertextual literacy practices (Garcia [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref79">28</reflink>]). I highlighted each type of play in yellow, green, and blue, respectively (see Figure 1). The majority of participants' role‐playing interactions fit into the latter three categories. The primary challenge of this coding phase was tracing participants' rapid shifts between role‐playing as characters (i.e., game play), strategizing as fellow players (i.e., metagame play), and making connections to texts and fandoms from beyond the game (i.e., intertextual play). Within a minute of RPG interaction, participants often shifted between these three types of play multiple times. Coding for game, metagame, and intertextual play allowed me to understand the traditional structure and narratology of Olly's campaign. In addition to these familiar moments of role play, however, there were instances of participant interactions that were difficult to categorize. So, I proceeded to a second iteration of coding based on my conceptual framework.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/01jul25/rrq70036-fig-0001.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70036-fig-0001.jpg" title="1 Color‐coded transcript based on forms of play here. Note. I highlighted game talk in yellow, metagame talk in green, and metadramatic talk in purple." /> </p> <p></p> <hd id="AN0186884673-23">Phase 2: Coding for Metalepsis, Metanarrative, and Transludology</hd> <p>After coding for moments of game, metagame, and intertextual play, I was left with multiple lines of uncoded interaction that appeared to blur these play types. So, I began thinking with concepts of gaming (Cannon et al. [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref80">12</reflink>]; Howell [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref81">40</reflink>]) and unnatural narratology (Bell [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref82">6</reflink>]; Bell and Alber [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref83">7</reflink>]; Lovrod [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref84">50</reflink>]; Stewart [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref85">73</reflink>]) to understand these strange moments of liminal play. When I noticed interactions that blurred intertextual references with the gameplay narrative, for instance, I marked the timestamp in orange and noted it as an example of metalepsis. When I noticed moments that blurred metagame play with gameplay, I marked the timestamp in purple and noted it as an example of metadrama. Finally, when I noticed participants blend RPG mechanics with other intertextual rulesets, I marked the timestamp in red and noted it as an example of transludic play.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-24">Phase 3: Discerning Compositional Functions of Liminal Play</hd> <p>In Phase 3 of analysis, I revisited moments of liminal play to determine their phenomenological consequences (Corbin and Strauss [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref86">15</reflink>]). While liminal play often appeared to be silly, "off‐task" behavior, I began considering how these moments forwarded co‐authorship practices. To do this, I first researched the intertextual references to games and texts that students made throughout their gameplay. For example, to understand why Drew repeatedly shouted "Jumaji!" at the beginning of Olly's campaign, I had to re‐read Chris Van Allsburg's ([<reflink idref="bib78" id="ref87">78</reflink>]) <emph>Jumanji</emph>. After re‐reading the text, I recognized that Drew had been testing his ability to escape Olly's world, Luxa. As I will explain in the findings, Drew's utterances served a function, helping him understand and participate in the rules of Olly's campaign. As a method of analysis, it was important to research participants' intertextual references from beyond the game.</p> <p>Even after researching and understanding participants' cryptic intertextual references, the purposes of their liminal play were not always apparent. So, my subsequent analysis coded for the following three elements: (a) participants' explanations of their liminal play, (b) peers' uptake and responses to liminal play, and (c) the impact of liminal play on the unfolding content and trajectory of the campaign. Coding for these three elements helped me better discern the relational and compositional utility of liminal play. Finally, I worked to collapse codes (Creswell and Creswell Báez [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref88">20</reflink>]) of liminal play into shared categories of compositional function. The structure of my findings below mirrors how I organized and collapsed my codes.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-25">Findings</hd> <p>Taking up Olly's campaign as a critical instance case (Davey [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref89">22</reflink>]), I examined multiple vignettes from his campaign that highlighted significant moments of liminal play. As outlined in my study methods, my findings are organized across three liminal categories: metaleptic play, metadramatic play, and transludic play. I understood these liminal categories as sites of playful bleed between the game, metagame, and intertext (see Figure 2). The findings below demonstrate how attention to liminal play illuminated a breadth of innovative literacy practices that participants employed to negotiate the content and processes of co‐authorship. To collaboratively generate a story, the participants played at the intersections of overlapping fandoms, positionalities, rules, and worlds to determine how Olly's campaign would unfold.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/01jul25/rrq70036-fig-0002.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70036-fig-0002.jpg" title="2 Liminal play heuristic." /> </p> <p></p> <p>I must clarify that vignettes highlighted in the findings do not constitute a comprehensive, chronological summary of Olly's campaign narrative. Olly's campaign unfolded across 9 h of role‐playing—the story was elaborate, and liminal play did not emerge during every significant narrative beat. Thus, the intent of the proceeding findings and vignettes is to portray and nuance significant moments of liminal play across a series of narrative snapshots.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-27">Metaleptic Play</hd> <p>While role‐playing as characters within Olly's campaign, participants frequently evoked metaleptic connections to texts beyond Olly's fantasy world. As a result, characters and elements from other texts transgressed into the reality of Olly's world. My analysis revealed that these jarring moments of metalepsis served meaningful compositional functions that advanced meaning‐making and collaborative play. Below, I describe three functions of metaleptic play.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-28">Metalepsis as Inter‐Narrative Continuity</hd> <p>Before Olly created his campaign, I facilitated a customized RPG campaign that took place in a futuristic society called Ravin. While in Ravin, the participants had to address a series of ecological disasters resulting from climate change. A recurring character in Ravin was a clumsy inventor named Goblin Greg. The participants loved Goblin Greg. For the remainder of my campaign, the participants created additional, humorous lore for Goblin Greg. After my campaign concluded, Goblin Greg remained an enduring character throughout each participant's successive campaign.</p> <p>Olly's campaign took place in a world named Luxa. Luxa was a fantasy realm, full of evil gods, that existed in an entirely separate universe from Ravin. Nevertheless, Olly explained that Goblin Greg was responsible for the transition from Ravin to Luxa—he gave the participants' characters a magical book, and its pages sucked them into the new universe of Luxa. Goblin Greg became a metaleptic being that connected and traversed the boundaries between the two campaigns. Even though the settings, characters, and conflicts in Luxa were entirely different from those in Ravin, the participants decided that Goblin Greg had become the overarching villain of The Worldbuilding Workshop. As a result, the participants' collaborative decisions in Olly's campaign were oriented toward escaping Luxa and defeating Goblin Greg. The group's unfolding vendetta against Goblin Greg surprised Olly. In fact, Olly had already created an entirely different villain for the Luxa campaign. But Olly's decision to transform Goblin Greg into a metaleptic being between universes inspired a series of ulterior, co‐authored motives among his peers. Perhaps paradoxically, the players' in‐game actions within Luxa were acutely aimed at the liminal spaces between my campaign and Olly's campaign.</p> <p>Goblin Greg, the newfound antagonist of The Worldbuilding Workshop, recurred across every participant's campaign. Following Olly's lead, the other participants bookended their campaigns with Goblin Greg transitioning them across different universes. To this end, Goblin Greg provided inter‐narrative continuity (i.e., a liminal, connective tissue) from campaign to campaign. Each youth game master (GM) after Olly iterated on Goblin Greg's design when incorporating him into their campaigns. Drew's campaign included a thinly veiled version of Goblin Greg named Robot Reg who wore tin foil on his ears. Mark narrated his campaign under the moniker Cthulu Craig while wearing a squid mask. Finally, the antagonist of Alec's campaign was a fire‐breathing character named Dragon Dreg. Alec explained that, "there <emph>has</emph> to be a Goblin Greg in each [campaign]!" (audio recording, May 18, 2022). Incorporating Goblin Greg had developed into a group norm among the participants. Goblin Greg had become a liminal, metaleptic subject woven across everyone's campaign in ways that maintained narrative continuity across the year‐long Worldbuilding Workshop program.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-29">Metalepsis as Mentor Text</hd> <p>Olly generated the setting and theology of Luxa through metaleptic references to a trading card game called <emph>Magic: The Gathering</emph> (i.e., <emph>Magic</emph>). In <emph>Magic</emph>, the cards represent five suits: forests, plains, mountains, swamps, and islands. Similarly, Olly created his world map across five environments: The Whispering Woods, The Great Plains, The Sky Cutter Mountains, The Black Swamp, and The Drowned Isle (see Figure 3). Each environment was also home to a god character from <emph>Magic</emph>. In Figure 3, the <emph>Magic</emph> cards that inspired Olly's campaign design are superimposed atop their corresponding environments. As the participants traveled from destination to destination, they encountered the gods and obtained magical items and blessings that symbolized their respective ideals (e.g., Kefnet's fervency, Hazoret's mindfulness, etc.). While <emph>Magic</emph> lore heavily shaped Olly's campaign, his world was entirely distinct from the <emph>Magic</emph> universe. Thus, the elements of <emph>Magic</emph> that bled into his world served as metaleptic mentor texts that helped him design the themes, settings, and narrative trajectories of the campaign.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/01jul25/rrq70036-fig-0003.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70036-fig-0003.jpg" title="3 Olly's campaign map (Edited to Feature Magic References)." /> </p> <p></p> <p>I was unaware of Luxa's connection to <emph>Magic</emph> until the participants told me about it during one of our play sessions. Apparently, Kyle and Mark were also experienced <emph>Magic</emph> players and familiar with the five gods referenced in Olly's campaign. They enthusiastically sent me website links to additional information about the gods. As the campaign ensued, Kyle and Mark's prior knowledge of Rhonas, Oketra, Hazoret, Bontu, and Kefnet informed how they strategized their play with peers. Like the cards, each god had strengths and weaknesses that the players could exploit to complete their quests. For example, Kyle knew that Bontu would only attack the players if they hurt his minions—it was an attribute on the Bontu <emph>Magic</emph> card—so Kyle worked with his peers to brainstorm ways to avoid combat with the minions and defeat Bontu. Thus, metaleptic <emph>Magic</emph> characters like Bontu served as mentor texts for the players too, informing how they co‐authored the action of Olly's campaign.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-31">Metalepsis as Community Bridging</hd> <p>Metaleptic play also worked to bridge connections between the participants' shared fandoms and communities. In Session Two, for example, Olly roared, "Resistance is futile!" as he role‐played the campaign's antagonist. In response to Olly's metaleptic evocation of the Borg from Star Trek, Mark said, "As someone who has watched Star Trek... mostly because my parents made me, but then because it was actually a good show... I'm now imagining I'm hearing this from a robot" (audio recording, November 11, 2021). This vignette highlights how moments of metaleptic play yielded both affiliative and interpretive affordances among the participants. Mark explained how Olly's role‐play as the Borg served as a bridge between their online RPG community and Mark's family life. Star Trek was a fandom that Mark learned to love through his relationship with his parents, and he welcomed the Borg cameo in the RPG campaign. Mark's prior knowledge about the Borg also textured how he interpreted Olly's antagonist. Since the Borg were cybernetic organisms (i.e., part organic matter, and part machinery), Mark signaled to the group that Olly's antagonist might be part robot. This demonstrated how Olly's three‐word utterance surfaced a breadth of personal and intertextual connections that shaped how the group made sense of his campaign.</p> <p>During another scene in Session Two of Olly's campaign, the participants encountered a challenge that pitted them against a horde of zombies. Before encountering the horde, however, the participants' had also been turned into zombies by a magical mist. As a result, the characters had to carefully distinguish friend zombies from foe zombies. During this scene, Alec shouted, "Hey, is it Death Mist? Is it Death Mist from Percy Jackson!?" (audio recording, November 11, 2021). After identifying the magical mist as Death Mist, Alec informed his peers that their collective zombification would eventually wear off—they did not need to panic or search for a cure. I later learned that Olly, Alec, and Kyle shared a deep appreciation for Rick Riordan's <emph>Percy Jackson and the Olympians</emph> novel series. They had all read Percy Jackson books in their middle school English classes. The Percy Jackson mythos repeatedly made metaleptic transgressions into the participants' worlds and storytelling practices throughout the year‐long Worldbuilding Workshop. As a result, a liminal community space emerged, bridging Olly's campaign with his peers' fandoms, familial relationships, and schooling experiences. The group's collaborative play occurred at a nexus of overlapping affiliations and personal histories.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-32">Metadramatic Play</hd> <p>In previous studies, I have analyzed how RPG participants rapidly toggle between their player and character identities (Corbitt [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref90">16</reflink>]). However, sometimes gamers transition between their dual identities in ways that are blurred and opaque—it is unclear where the player ends and the character begins. Across Olly's 6‐week campaign, there were multiple moments when the boundaries between players and their characters dissolved. These were moments of metadramatic play when participants broke the conventions of play and straddled the divide between game and metagame interaction. In these instances, participants communicated across multiple identities to collaboratively understand and navigate the RPG campaign. As described below, Olly and his peers leveraged metadramatic play to facilitate knowledge management, narrative momentum, and compositional negotiation.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-33">Metadrama as Knowledge Management</hd> <p>A common problem in role‐playing games is that there are narrative boundaries between players' knowledge and characters' knowledge. For example, players who have extensive RPG expertise might have preexisting knowledge of monsters or magical phenomena that their current fledgling characters do not. Players might also overhear private discoveries made by companion characters during metagame talk (e.g., "I just uncovered a mysterious passageway during my solo spelunking expedition!"), but their in‐game characters are not yet aware of their companion's new information. This gap between player and character knowledge presents a conundrum in which players must role‐play their characters in good faith, adhering to their characters' lack of omniscience. In certain circumstances, however, a GM might reveal information from a liminal space between the game and metagame. This liminal type of knowledge management was evidenced multiple times throughout Olly's campaign.</p> <p>In Session 2 of Olly's campaign, the players' characters had to fight each other in a battle royale scenario. Only one character could survive and gain the gods' favor. This situation frustrated the players, because they loved their characters and did not want them to die. To ease his peers' angst, Olly said, "In game <emph>and</emph> out of game: whoever loses doesn't die. They just can't pass the trial, they can't reach Bontu" (audio recording, November 11, 2021). Olly's statement, positioned in the liminal space between the game talk and metagame talk, worked to notify both the players and characters that the consequences of the battle were not as dire as they initially thought. This revelation inspired the players to engage their characters in the battle royale with reckless abandon—a decision that they would have otherwise avoided.</p> <p>By managing knowledge among both the players and their characters, Olly helped his peers relax and continue the scene without the anxiety of having their characters die. Moreover, the players were able to co‐author and strategize the battle royale without the epistemological tension of censoring knowledge between their player and character positionalities. While Olly might have been able to communicate this information to the players and characters through more subtle developments within the narrative (e.g., showing another character lose the battle and getting safely transported elsewhere), his decision to spontaneously reveal information across the game and metagame functioned as liminal narrative triage to immediately quell the players' frustration.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-34">Metadrama as Narrative Momentum</hd> <p>As experienced gamers know, the narrative momentum of role‐playing games can be derailed by many factors (e.g., side conversations about unrelated topics, arguments, snack time, etc.). During these moments, there are many strategies that GMs and players employ to refocus the groups' attention back to co‐authoring the game narrative. In Olly's campaign, the participants used metadramatic play to move in and out of the storyworld and propel gameplay.</p> <p>During Olly's campaign, his peers often engaged in side conversations when discovering new locations and histories of Luxa. To keep their focus on the game, Olly employed metadrama to transition metagame discussions back into the game. In one scene, for example, Olly role‐played as a townsperson, saying, "This is around the year 1430 AR.... after the gods of Luxa rose to protect us from the great evil tsar" (audio recording, November 4, 2021). Not knowing what a tsar was, Alec broke into metagame discourse, asking "Is that like a type of underwear or something?" Mark clarified, "No, no, it's a type of ruler." Alec then understood and said, "Oh yeah, like Russia. Okay, Russian tsars." At this point, Olly's in‐game character interjected into Alec and Mark's metagame conversation, asking, "What is Russia?" Surprised, Alec and Mark resumed role‐playing their characters, saying, "Um, from [another] universe." With everyone back in‐character, Olly resumed the scene as planned.</p> <p>In the above example of metadrama, Olly situated his comment "What is Russia?" in the liminal space between game and metagame interaction. Olly's character interjected into Mark and Alec's metagame sidebar to solicit an in‐game response. Recognizing the breach between game and metagame, Alec and Mark explained to the townsperson that they were speaking from the position of people from a different universe. Then, understanding that Olly expected them to resume gameplay, Mark and Alec seamlessly transitioned back into their characters to continue the game as planned. More than rhetorical flair or postmodern storytelling, metadrama served the compositional function of negotiating narrative momentum. This moment highlighted how co‐authorship can entail the negotiation of both the content and process of narrative storytelling. All of the participants understood that liminal transgressions across game and metagame talk worked to collaboratively calibrate the momentum of play.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-35">Metadrama as Compositional Negotiation</hd> <p>Collaborative storytelling, such as role‐playing, is always a negotiated practice between multiple stakeholders. In RPGs, players and GMs must work toward narrative outcomes that are both personally and collectively satisfying. This work can entail moments of tension, clarification, and revision between participants. These compositional negotiations sometimes occur in liminal spaces between the game and metagame. Liminal play negotiations can take various forms—from characters subtly conspiring against the narrator to explicit brokering between characters and players. In Olly's campaign, metadramatic negotiations helped participants' characters conspire against Olly and disrupt his control over the narrative.</p> <p>Olly frequently used dice to decide the outcomes of the campaign narrative. For example, he sometimes rolled "perception checks" to determine if characters noticed anything significant in their current location (e.g., a lurking foe, or a hidden piece of treasure). During a scene in an underground dungeon, Olly abruptly rolled dice before saying, "Nothing seems unusual" (audio recording, November 18, 2021). This comment seemed suspicious to the characters, and they quickly began questioning Olly's reliability as a narrator. "Uh oh," said Drew's character. Alec's character shouted "Sus!"—an abbreviated term for "suspicious." Here, the characters openly interrogated Olly's narration and warned each other that the GM's dice rolling signified impending danger. In response, Olly acted coy and prompted the characters to "just continue playing." However, the characters proceeded with caution and slowed their movement in anticipation of a plot twist in the story. As the characters continued through the dungeon, they soon discovered that some of the tiles on the floor were boobytrapped. If they stepped on the wrong tiles, spears would launch at them from hidden crevices in the walls. Had the characters rushed down the dungeon corridors and not taken precautions, they would have certainly gotten severely injured by the traps. Thus, their strategic in‐game play was informed by their metadramatic interpretation of Olly's out‐of‐game dice rolling.</p> <p>In other situations, participants' characters sometimes confronted Olly directly. One such confrontation occurred when Olly tried to dictate the actions of Drew's character. It is typically a faux pas for a GM to co‐opt a player's character—characters are among limited elements of RPGs that players can control. So, when Olly told Drew that his character was attempting to flee a battle, Drew embodied his character, waved his finger at the Zoom camera, and replied, "No I'm not. I'm not attempting to leave." Nevertheless, Olly began to co‐opt Drew's character and make him retreat. When Drew protested again, Olly revised his narration and said, "Oh, ok. I'm only saying what it would be like <emph>if</emph> you decided to leave" (audio recording, November 10, 2021). This negotiation between a character and GM marked an interesting moment of compositional negotiation. By confronting Olly in the liminal space of metadrama, Drew's character witnessed two alternative timelines of the narrative unfold. In one timeline, the GM co‐opted his character and fled from battle. In the revised timeline, Drew's character resumed combat beside his in‐game comrades. This example of metadrama highlighted how liminal playspaces between the game and metagame allowed for spontaneous clarification, resistance, and revision. Furthermore, the repeated and metadramatic protests from Drew's character appeared to elicit empathy from Olly. Through this liminal negotiation, the campaign narrative proceeded in a pleasing direction for both Olly and Drew.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-36">Transludic Play</hd> <p>Popular role‐playing games, such as <emph>Dungeons & Dragons</emph>, mediate storytelling through systems of rules and mechanics. Participants learn how to engage in collaborative role‐play through structured practices of character generation, turn‐taking, dice rolling, and more. As a play system, these rules and mechanics determine how players interact with and impose change in their co‐authored adventures. In the case of Olly's campaign, Luxa had a customized system of game mechanics. Unlike most RPGs, Olly did not provide the players with a document of rules and procedures. This meant that the players had to figure out the rules of Luxa and collaboratively discover how to participate in the storytelling process. To norm their interactions, the players engaged in transludic play by experimenting with strategies from other games and fictional contexts they had encountered in the past. By employing strategies from different contexts, the participants inhabited a liminal space between metagame play and intertextual references to other games and imaginary worlds. As I will describe below, this type of liminal play helped players better understand co‐authoring procedures in Olly's campaign.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-37">Transludology as Interactional Norming</hd> <p>Transludic play occurred almost immediately when the players began Olly's campaign. Upon being sucked into a book and transported to the world of Luxa, participants promptly worked to discern how Luxa functioned compared to the mechanics of other worlds they knew. Drew, for example, immediately compared Luxa to the enchanted world of Chris Van Allsburg's ([<reflink idref="bib78" id="ref91">78</reflink>]) <emph>Jumanji</emph>. This comparison made sense because Luxa and Jumanji were both worlds that magically emerged from a book and a board game, respectively. "We're in Jumanji!" exclaimed Drew, "In order to get out of here, we have to yell Jumanji very loudly" (audio recording, November 4, 2021). This statement was a liminal, boundary‐breaking action that implicated the world of Jumanji within the world of Luxa. While Drew may have not actually believed Luxa and Jumanji were the same world, his comment served as a playful superimposition intended to make sense of how Luxa operated. In response to Drew, Olly said, "You yell up to the sky. Nothing happens. Except some people look at you a little strangely." Olly's narration tactfully informed Drew that Luxa and Jumanji were governed by different rules.</p> <p>In other instances of transludic play, participants used intertextual references to understand character mechanics in the game. At the end of Session 1, for example, Olly invited each player to choose a specialization for their characters. Each player could make their character a healer, mage, thief, or fighter. After Olly described the attributes of the thief specialization, Kyle asked, "So a thief is pretty much a rogue from D&D?" (audio recording, November 4, 2021). In response, Olly said, "Similar, yes. Although we're operating on the first edition kind of style." Here, Olly acknowledged that the rules of his world had similarities to the first edition of <emph>Dungeons & Dragons</emph>. This comparison gave Kyle a framework to understand his character's specialization.</p> <p>In the same way that metaleptic play allowed Olly to integrate narrative elements from <emph>Magic the Gathering</emph> into Luxa, transludic play allowed Olly to borrow rule systems from <emph>Dungeons & Dragons</emph> into Luxa. Rather than debrief all of the rules and mechanics of his campaign prior to play, Olly preferred to let his peers gradually uncover how the world functioned through their participation. This was unlike typical RPGs in which players must learn the rules prior to role‐playing. Transludic play helped participants flag Luxa's mechanics and tap into their prior gaming histories to discover how to interact in Olly's campaign. Through constant references to other games and liminal moments of boundary‐breaking (e.g., yelling "Jumanji!" in Luxa), the players could norm their participation in ways that were conducive to collaborative play and co‐authorship.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-38">Discussion & Implications</hd> <p>Building on games studies scholarship (Boluk and Lemieux [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref92">10</reflink>]; Fine [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref93">25</reflink>]; Garfield [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref94">32</reflink>]; Simkins and Steinkuehler [<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref95">62</reflink>]) and literacies research on role‐playing (Garcia [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref96">27</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref97">28</reflink>]; Jones et al. [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref98">42</reflink>]; Seltzer [<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref99">60</reflink>]; Storm and Jones [<reflink idref="bib74" id="ref100">74</reflink>]), I worked to understand how six youth gamers engaged in playful co‐authorship during a youth‐facilitated RPG campaign. Troubling the boundaries between game, metagame, and intertextual play, I analyzed liminal moments of participant interaction that bled across multiple playspaces. Specifically, I identified metaleptic play, metadramatic play, and transludic play as liminal practices that unfolded during Olly's campaign. Though not an exhaustive list of examples, I provided vignettes of liminal play that forwarded participants' collaborative storytelling. Similar to anthropological accounts of liminality as stages of adolescence and social becoming (Turner [<reflink idref="bib77" id="ref101">77</reflink>]; van Gennep, 1909), these vignettes of liminal play represented transformative moments of playful interaction in which participants negotiated the content and process of Olly's emerging RPG adventure. Through my analysis of player interactions, I hoped to highlight how intertextual references, metadramatic disruptions, and transludic thinking across game systems served as conceptual and processual resources for participants' co‐authorship.</p> <p>In the two sections below, I discuss the significance of my findings and their potential implications for future literacies research. First, I situate my findings within ongoing game studies discourses about narratological and ludological approaches to understanding gameplay. Then, I consider how moments of liminal play—like all dimensions of play—are laden with power differentials that require the critical attention of gamers, educators, and researchers.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-39">Bridging Narratological and Ludological Interpretations of Gameplay</hd> <p>Across this paper, I have layered theories of narratology (Bell [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref102">6</reflink>]; Bell and Alber [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref103">7</reflink>]; Lovrod [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref104">50</reflink>]; Stewart [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref105">73</reflink>]) and game studies (Cannon et al. [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref106">12</reflink>]; Howell [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref107">40</reflink>]) to understand the literate potentials and processes of gameplay. By tracing how game, metagame, and intertextual play converged during moments of liminal interaction, my findings could help bridge what Kokonis ([<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref108">46</reflink>]) described as a "theoretical chasm between researchers, scholars and critics... to understand each other when talking about games and stories" (p. 175). In particular, this "theoretical chasm" refers to the differences between narratological and ludological interpretations of gameplay. Narratologists consider how games mediate various forms of storytelling, whereas ludologists consider how games mediate playful activity through rules and mechanics. While there is some disagreement about the extent to which narratologists and ludologists are embroiled in methodological debates about game analysis (Frasca [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref109">26</reflink>]), some scholars have claimed that the narrative elements of games are encountered more passively—and, thus, are of less interest—than moments of player activity (Loftus and Loftus [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref110">49</reflink>]). Whether or not games studies research is characterized by fiery debates between narratologists and ludologists, a theoretical divide persists in the field that wedges story and activity as separate phenomena of inquiry.</p> <p>To merge narrative and ludic interpretations of gameplay, Kokonis ([<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref111">46</reflink>]) proposed a "text vs. practice" model of semiotic analysis that considers how game‐based signs and symbols represent both the narrative elements and action‐oriented elements of play. Building on this effort to integrate narrative and ludic understandings of gameplay, my study took an interactionist approach to analyzing how players negotiated game content (i.e., characters, themes, settings, and other narrative elements) and game process (i.e., rules, procedures, and mechanics) simultaneously during liminal play. Below, I reflect on my findings to highlight how aspects of participants' RPG narratives and RPG mechanics bled into one another—that is, the stories they told and the game‐based interactions they employed were co‐constitutive.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-40">Liminal Negotiations of RPG Content and Process</hd> <p>To co‐author Olly's RPG campaign, the study participants simultaneously negotiated their unfolding story content and their playful processes. These negotiations often occurred during liminal moments of metaleptic, transludic, and metadramatic play. Across multiple vignettes of play, Olly and his peers demonstrated how the narrative and ludic dimensions of RPG play informed each other.</p> <p>Olly's campaign was composed of both original content and content metaleptically borrowed from other texts. For example, the five environments of Luxa—Olly's fantasy RPG world—were identical to the five suits (i.e., forests, plains, mountains, swamps, and islands) of the popular card game <emph>Magic: The Gathering</emph>. Similarly, Luxa's environments were home to many gods (i.e., Kefnet, Hazoret, Bontu, etc.) that were based on specific character cards from <emph>Magic</emph>. Rather than interpret the connections between Luxa and <emph>Magic</emph> as plagiarism, Olly's peers understood that Luxa sometimes constituted a liminal space that included elements of their favorite games, texts, and fandoms. These metaleptic transgressions of intertextual content had an impact on how participants interpreted and composed the unfolding story of Olly's adventure. The majority of the participants were active <emph>Magic</emph> players, so Olly's references to the card game's content made their adventure through Luxa more vivid. Alec described the artwork on <emph>Magic</emph> cards as "gorgeous," and claimed that connections between Luxa and <emph>Magic</emph> helped him understand and envision Olly's RPG world. When interacting with <emph>Magic</emph>‐inspired characters, players like Kyle could leverage their understanding of the card game mechanics to inform how they strategically approached certain battles and challenges within Olly's adventure. Thus, these metaleptic narrative transgressions impacted both the players interpretation of the unfolding narrative and their characters' interactions therein.</p> <p>Whereas metaleptic play occurred when Olly incorporated story elements from other texts into the world of Luxa, transludic play occurred when Olly's peers compared his RPG adventure to the rules and mechanics of other games and narrative worlds. An example of transludic play occurred when Olly introduced his peers to the world of Luxa as their characters fell into the pages of a magic book. This event reminded Drew of the children's book <emph>Jumanji</emph> in which two children fell into a magical board game. In particular, Drew remembered that the children were able to escape the board game by screaming, "Jumanji!" So, Drew also shouted "Jumanji" to escape the pages of Luxa. Even though Drew's strategy failed, this moment highlighted a unique connection between narrative worlds and their mechanics. By comparing Luxa and Jumanji, Drew sought to glean insights into the rules that shaped Olly's RPG setting. This interaction, though brief, highlighted how narrative worlds are shaped by ludic properties that inform their characters' actions.</p> <p>Finally, metadramatic play included instances when participants drew upon their hybrid subject positions—as players and characters—to determine how to interact within Olly's campaign. When Drew and Alec heard Olly suspiciously rolling dice, for example, they inferred that he was determining the group's perception check. A perception check is a randomized method to decide if characters can notice something important in an RPG scene, like a trap. Wary of Olly's dice rolling, the players decided to navigate the scene carefully and anticipate boobytraps. Thus, the players leveraged metagame knowledge (i.e., dice rolling) to determine game interactions (i.e., navigating a dungeon cautiously). Conversely, Olly sometimes leveraged metadramatic play to communicate "in game <emph>and</emph> out of game" to provide interactional clarifications to players and their characters. These vignettes highlighted how character and player positionalities bled into each other during liminal play as participants simultaneously considered the narrative (i.e., game) and ludic (i.e., metagame) dimensions of Olly's RPG adventure. Analyzing the story‐based and rules‐based interactions in Olly's campaign as separate phenomena of inquiry would fail to capture the deft liminal play practices that the participants implemented.</p> <p>The three examples of metaleptic play, transludic play, and metadramatic play above demonstrate how narrative and ludic interactions were laminated together in single scenes of RPG play. The game mechanics shaped the narrative world, and the narrative world shaped the game mechanics. Meanwhile, Olly and his peers inhabited multiple identities and subject positions to strategically encounter and negotiate the narrative and ludic dimensions of the RPG adventure. An attention to liminal play could create more opportunities for scholars to bridge theories and methods of narratology and ludology across literacies and gaming research.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-41">Analyzing Liminal Play to Interrogate Power Differentials</hd> <p>Research on joint activity interrogates how learning and interaction are cultural processes in which participants build upon and transform resources generated by others (Goodwin [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref112">34</reflink>]; Nasir et al. [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref113">53</reflink>]). Co‐authorship, too, is a cultural and ideological activity that entails the distribution of power and narrative control. In RPG contexts, the participants (i.e., the GM and players) collectively determine game outcomes that are fair and reasonable for everyone involved. Sometimes players must abdicate some of their control to allow their peers an equitable stake in the storytelling process. However, RPG contexts—like all gaming contexts—are inevitably imbued with power differentials. Unequal distributions of power, and the liminal negotiations thereof, were evident in Olly's campaign.</p> <p>Throughout Olly's campaign, the participants negotiated control over the content and process of the narrative. Sometimes the distribution of control was contested—particularly between Olly and the players. Since Olly was the GM, he both created and facilitated the RPG world. As a result, Olly reserved more control over the campaign than his peers. Although Olly endeavored to be a thoughtful and judicious GM, there were moments of gameplay when the power inequities between Olly and his peers were particularly glaring. For example, Olly used a breadth of strategies to maintain the narrative momentum of his campaign and avoid off‐task conversations. One of his strategies was to render the content of the players' off‐task interactions incommunicable. During a moment when Mark and Alec were having a sidebar discussion about tsars and Russia, Olly interjected and asked, "What is Russia?" to signal that their reference to a country on Earth had no relevance within the world of Luxa. Although Mark and Alec were not being particularly disrespectful, Olly used his position as GM to curtail their conversation and resume gameplay.</p> <p>In another moment of liminal play, Olly attempted to co‐opt Drew's character and dictate their actions. In response, Drew's character used metadramatic talk to challenge and undo Olly's narration. After a brief exchange, Olly relented and allowed Drew to resume control of his character. Here, the processual nature of Olly's campaign was contested—Olly attempted to assert agency over aspects of the game that were beyond the scope of his role as a GM. By challenging Olly, Drew's character recovered his self‐determination.</p> <p>The overlapping identities, narrative worlds, and game mechanics of liminal play also warrant critical interrogations of inclusion and representation. Who or what is allowed to bleed into a playspace is an ideological issue with significant consequences. Across Olly's campaign, the intertextual content that metaleptically entered the narrative featured majority white, male characters (e.g., <emph>Magic: The Gathering</emph>, <emph>Percy Jackson and the Olympians</emph>, <emph>Star Trek</emph>, <emph>Jumanji</emph>, etc.). With the one exception of Steve Harvey—aforementioned in the opening vignette of the paper—Olly never made metaleptic references to women and People of Color. The underrepresentation of women and People of Color in Olly's campaign reflected "the ongoing cultural and historical framing of games as contexts in which diverse representation has been violently resisted by white male players" (Garcia [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref114">29</reflink>], p. 6). Although all of the participants in The Worldbuilding Workshop identified as white boys, their lack of inclusive liminal play raises concerns about which identities they valued and empathized with throughout their co‐authorship. Research has shown that male‐dominated and whitewashed playspaces can actively push out women and gamers of Color (Garcia [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref115">27</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref116">29</reflink>]; Gray [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref117">35</reflink>]). Thus, it is important to reflexively examine the texts, fandoms, and communities that are ratified within liminal play—the endorsement and normativity of privileged communities can result in the silencing of historically minoritized communities.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-42">Conclusion</hd> <p>An attention to liminal play gives language and analytic nuance to the compelling, and sometimes unusual, moments of play when the game, metagame, and intertext bleed into each other. Throughout this paper, I have argued that liminal play—including metaleptic, metadramatic, and transludic play—is a consequential activity that shapes game‐based co‐authorship. In addition to providing theoretical insights that could bridge narratological and ludological interpretations of gaming, analyzing liminal play might provide critical opportunities to interrogate power differentials present in gaming spaces. Effective co‐authorship requires equitable negotiations of narrative content and process, and future research might consider how playful contexts beyond RPG communities leverage a breadth of critical composing practices. By expanding and sharpening how we understand the complexities of playful interaction, we might better witness the brilliance and narrative collaborations among youth and adult learners.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-43">Conflicts of Interest</hd> <p>The author declares no conflicts of interest.</p> <hd id="AN0186884673-44">Data Availability Statement</hd> <p>Research data are not shared.</p> <ref id="AN0186884673-45"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref11" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Abrams, S. S., and J. C. Lammers. 2017. " Belonging in a Videogame Space: Bridging Affinity Spaces and Communities of Practice." 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  Data: Liminal Play: Coauthoring Narratives across Metaleptic, Metadramatic, and Transludic Interactions
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Alex+Corbitt%22">Alex Corbitt</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3453-3214">0000-0002-3453-3214</externalLink>)
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Reading+Research+Quarterly%22"><i>Reading Research Quarterly</i></searchLink>. 2025 60(3).
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  Data: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
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– Name: Pages
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  Data: 17
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  Data: 2025
– Name: TypeDocument
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  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research
– Name: Subject
  Label: Descriptors
  Group: Su
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Role+Playing%22">Role Playing</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Games%22">Educational Games</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Story+Telling%22">Story Telling</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Play%22">Play</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Narration%22">Narration</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Drama%22">Drama</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Power+Structure%22">Power Structure</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Adolescents%22">Adolescents</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Videoconferencing%22">Videoconferencing</searchLink>
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  Data: 10.1002/rrq.70036
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  Label: ISSN
  Group: ISSN
  Data: 0034-0553<br />1936-2722
– Name: Abstract
  Label: Abstract
  Group: Ab
  Data: Role-playing games (RPGs) are storytelling activities that mediate co-authorship through a variety of in-game, out-of-game, and intertextual relationships. Liminal interactions sometimes occur during RPG play that blur these categories. To understand the purposes and processes of "liminal play," this study analyzed data from a yearlong RPG program co-facilitated by six teenage boys on Zoom. Thinking with three concepts from game studies and narratology--metalepsis, metadrama, and transludology--findings highlight how moments of liminal play helped participants negotiate the dramatic content and authorial procedures of their unfolding narrative worlds. Rethinking theories of play that conceptualize game narratives and game mechanics as discrete phenomena, the discussion examines how a variety of rules, roles, and relationships intersect during moments of liminal play. As a result, study implications consider how researchers and practitioners might account for the complex dynamics of liminal play in ways that interrogate power differentials embedded in playful contexts.
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  Data: 2025
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  Data: EJ1478133
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      – Type: doi
        Value: 10.1002/rrq.70036
    Languages:
      – Text: English
    PhysicalDescription:
      Pagination:
        PageCount: 17
    Subjects:
      – SubjectFull: Role Playing
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Educational Games
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Story Telling
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Play
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Narration
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Drama
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Power Structure
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Adolescents
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Videoconferencing
        Type: general
    Titles:
      – TitleFull: Liminal Play: Coauthoring Narratives across Metaleptic, Metadramatic, and Transludic Interactions
        Type: main
  BibRelationships:
    HasContributorRelationships:
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Alex Corbitt
    IsPartOfRelationships:
      – BibEntity:
          Dates:
            – D: 01
              M: 07
              Type: published
              Y: 2025
          Identifiers:
            – Type: issn-print
              Value: 0034-0553
            – Type: issn-electronic
              Value: 1936-2722
          Numbering:
            – Type: volume
              Value: 60
            – Type: issue
              Value: 3
          Titles:
            – TitleFull: Reading Research Quarterly
              Type: main
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